About the LRMI

Since its establishment in 2011, the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) has worked to make it easier to publish, discover, and deliver quality educational resources on the web. Read below for a general background of the project or visit our FAQ page.

Co-led from spring 2011 through fall 2014 by the Association of Educational Publishers–the 501(c)(3) division of the Association of American Publishers–and Creative Commons, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the LRMI has developed a common metadata framework for describing or “tagging” learning resources on the web. This framework is a key first step in developing a richer, more fruitful search experience for educators and learners. Once a critical mass of educational content has been tagged to a universal framework, it becomes much easier to parse and filter that content, opening up tremendous possibilities for search and delivery.

The LRMI was spurred by the announcement in 2011 of Schema.org, a project by Bing, Google, and Yahoo! to create a standard way of tagging online content. While not directly connected, Schema.org created the opportunity for initiatives such as the LRMI by establishing a standard markup schema for general web content and then encouraging specialized communities and industries to extend this schema to meet their needs. The metadata schema developed by the LRMI was adopted by Schema.org in April 2013, meaning that anyone who publishes or curates educational content can now use LRMI markup to provide rich, education-specific metadata about their resources with the confidence that this metadata will be recognized by major search engines.

For more information, including the LRMI’s relation to existing education metadata schema and other initiatives such as the Learning Registry, please visit the FAQ page.